Hong Kong woman opens up about life after moment her heart stopped beating

The Star

28-06-2025

More than a decade ago, Hongkonger Olivia Cheung Lok-man's heart stopped beating for 63 minutes.
She was a 19-year-old student at the time and had suffered a fulminant myocarditis attack, a rare and severe illness that can cause heart failure.
Cheung, now a 30-year-old art teacher, has since developed the ability to cope with the uncertainties surrounding her condition, thanks to the special care of the medical team at Queen Mary Hospital's intensive care unit (ICU).
'I have experienced [near death], I don't think there's anything [my family and I] can't deal with,' she said.
Cheung and her doctor spoke to the media on Monday as part of the hospital's work with the Shaw Foundation to offer in-person and online activities to educate the public about intensive care treatments and patients' experiences.
Last year, lawmakers passed a legislative amendment that allows terminally ill patients to reject certain treatments, such as undergoing cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), as the end of their life nears.
Simon Sin Wai-ching, the critical care unit doctor at Queen Mary Hospital who treated Cheung, said he hoped more of the public, especially young people, would give more thought to what first aid options they were willing to undergo.
'How do patients feel before entering the ICU? How do they feel during intubation? If we can set up a platform for them to share such stories, it's much more effective than having doctors and residents guess what those procedures feel like,' he said.
He noted that less than 20 per cent of patients die in ICUs, where hospitals' best resources are available.
Speaking about his time treating Cheung, the doctor said her heart had suddenly skipped a few beats when she began suffering the fulminant myocarditis attack.
Sin said the hospital where Cheung was initially admitted had lacked an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation machine (ECMO), which acts as an artificial heart and lung.
An ECMO and a team of specialists had to be brought over from Queen Mary Hospital to keep her alive, he added.
The doctor recalled that the team was still travelling to the other hospital by taxi when they learned that Cheung's heart had completely stopped.
At the time of Cheung's fulminant myocarditis attack, each procedure using an ECMO cost more than HK$1 million. Most patients cannot survive undergoing CPR for more than 20 minutes.
'But the whole team was already in the taxi, and there was no place for a U-turn, so we sped ahead,' Sin said, noting an experienced ICU doctor who was jogging nearby had rushed to the hospital to perform CPR on Cheung.
Sixty-three minutes later, the specialist team were prepared for the operation and managed to get Cheung's heart beating again.
Sin recounted Cheung's miraculous survival in his book, When Suffering Becomes Life , which shares the post-ICU stories of his former patients.
Surviving also marked the start of a life of recovery for Cheung.
'I had to relearn writing and walking, but I picked up those skills again very quickly,' she said.
Her father, Cheung Wing-hung, said: 'When I first heard Olivia was saved, I worried about taking care of her. Would she need support to use the toilet [after hospitalisation]?'
While Olivia Cheung gradually recovered from her near-death experience, it continued to have an impact on her life eight years later, when she woke up one night having wet the bed and with a bleeding tongue.
In a check-up, doctors found she had epilepsy as her brain lacked oxygen when her heart stopped.
'Now I cannot drive a car. The medicine for epilepsy also made me too tired to work during the first two weeks I was on it,' she said.
But Cheung said that, in spite of her experiences, she remained positive and felt her problems were 'minor ones' compared with what others had gone through.